Mobile multihop networks have been considered lately as viable alternatives for the delivery and sharing of multimedia content between users. Performance of such networks is typically measured in terms of conflicting objectives, namely: end-to-end latency, end-to-end energy consumption, and network throughput. Subsequently, this calls for a packet delivery protocols which are able to establish a careful balance between these objectives. Recently, a packet forwarding protocol has been developed to meet such objectives. See Bader, Ahmed et al., “An Efficient Multi-Carrier Position-Based Packet Forwarding Protocol for Wireless Sensory Network,” IEEE Transaction on Wireless Communications, Volume 11, no. 1 (January 2012), the content of which is incorporated by reference in its entirety.
For example, the protocol is built using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for the physical (PHY) layer. Furthermore, the protocol utilizes position-based channel access techniques in conjunction with the OFDM PHY. This allows all eligible relays at a given hop to access the channel concurrently. Due to this property, the protocol is labelled as “multi-relay.” The protocol is indifferent to mobility since it does not mandate relays to have knowledge of the network topology. The use of OFDM makes it also quite resilient to fast fading environments and thus well-suited for mobility.